The encoding/decoding is heavy in codebases that have to run on Python 2 and Python 3 at the same time, and authors are worried about handling unicode correctly

The encoding/decoding is heavy in codebases that have to run on Python 2 and Python 3 at the same time, and authors are worried about handling unicode correctly on python 2. Ironically when your python 2 app doesn't care about unicode, the porting to python 3 is actually much easier.